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John Cleese and Writing Funny

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The writing must bring the reader along.

John Cleese is nearly always funny. And he has a lot to say about writing funny. In the “John Cleese Interview” that follows, he says that Basil Fawlty (from Cleese’s Fawlty Towers) was never angry at the beginning of the show. The funny bit was showing how he got there and showing it in a way the viewer could relate to. He goes on to describe the difficulty he had finding a branch to give his auto a good thrashing.

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Via Adweek

Written by kirkistan

January 6, 2016 at 8:40 am

3 Responses

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  1. This looks awesome…I’ve flagged it to check out over lunch! 😉

  2. […] Cleese felt he could perform Basil Fawlty for Specsavers because the voice they wanted was true to the character he had created. He had refused many […]

  3. […] Cleese spends his retirement talking about this place (try here or here. And especially here). He characterizes it as more of a time than a place—which I completely […]


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